No, I don't think it works like that.

I'd rather have one handcrafted dungeon, than ten random or procedurally generated ones. Having a totally hand-crafted world brings everything alive. What use is having a "Daggerfall" Amount of content if it isn't compelling.

I'll never understand this pedestal people hole stuff like randomized scenarios on, the less input the designers have on the game, the less overall quality we're given. Maybe in twenty years, when technology strong enough, is commercially viable, where we can get computers to mimic creativity nearly perfectly, randomized dungeons/areas will fit in, until then, the only word that comes to mind is bland.

I completely agree. I don't like anything randomized in my games. Hand crafted is much more unique.

No, you are doing it wrong.

The instant that you want to enter the dungeon, or the instant that the game engine thinks that a dungeon is needed, it is generated procedurally, and from then on it would be saved on the hard drive or something, and remain in the game as if it was predeveloped by the game developers.

In the current game you would have a definite and solid dungeon to tackle with, but in your next game with another character, well, it might just not be there anymore.

There's no reason why they couldn't do that and still have random dungeons. In Fallout 3, each door had an option of randomly connecting to a premade interior, with no two interiors ever getting attached to different doors. And, theoretically, once attached the interior and door would be linked for the rest of the game. So you could have say 5 pre-made dungeons attached to 5 different doors and you would never know which one you'd end up with. Or have 5 dungeons attached to only one door for a more random gameplay. Unfortunately it didn't work. I tried it in this mod I was working on but I could never get the outside door to connect to anything. Of course that would mean the creation of a hell of alot of dungeons.

Ah, now I get it, and changes my mind.
Something like that would improve alot the replay of the game.

What does that mean?

For it's time is was something to behold but it not that great. It would be much better if every dungeon didn't re-spawn the moment you left it. Just search around at a low level till you find crypt with 5 loots and 1 enemy and just walk in and out until your filthy rich.

But I never said about respawning, neither the man who answered me.
Also, there's no immediatly respawn after leaving the area since Morrowind, I don't see how implementing a system to change all the dungeons on every different save could change the respawn factor.

Are just the dungeons random, or parts of the world too?

That person doesn't know what they are talking about.

I always thought it would be really cool if oblivion or skyrim had npcs you can talk to. They tell you go to X and kill X there. You open up your world map and type in the name of the dungeon and go to it. The dungeon is randomly generated and fun to play through because of this. Seeing random dungeons return to elder scrolls would be awesome. You can still have all the 120+ dungeons in skyrim but have all the random ones outside of skyrim. Once you finish them and exit the dungeon you arrive back at a port town in skyrim.

Procedural generation is definitely something to look forward to in future-games, and I did love the fact that Daggerfall has something barely approaching that variation (though limitedly). It's something that has always interested, much like branching narrative into different possibilities (i.e. the world isn't saved, Mehrunes Dagon wins) or real Artificial life into a game. Guess we're still a bit far-off from that, though maybe not by much.

Well, a future version of radiant story can generate the quest and the environment that it happens in, on the fly and send you there.

And you don't seem to fully understand that in those days a dungeon was a collection of square hallways, 45 degree incline/declines, square rooms and sprites. Thats something that a computer could generate given some parameters, cause the textures could flesh themselves out.

Example:

RNG Selects Texture set 1, RNG generates hallway, then generates "stairs" down, then generates hallway, generates larger room, generates hallway etc... (remember all of these are little more then square corridors and square rooms)... spawn monsters at X% density, spawn chests with X Level loot at X% density...

Moving along to todays technologies....

The "dungeons" are hand crafted in (actual) three dimensions featuring complex geometry, complex texturing, complex physics, complex lighting, complex level of detail, complex meshes, complex traps and a slew of other things. A computer can't generate... a cave with a waterfall infested with giant spiders that sprawls into partially exposed caverns which meander deeper into the mountain caves where underground creeks and rivers lazily cascade through the cavernous expanses where glowing mushrooms light ancient altars and statues... etc etc etc

Seriously, go look at daggerfall on youtube... then go look at skyrim...

I'm not wanting to bash you, and I agree that the concept is intriguing... but we just... we aren't there yet...

Yes, a computer could generate dungeons in daggerfall... because You think a computer can generate

Yeah, randomized dungeons would be awesome. Though, as others have mentioned, it would hard to randomize them with our current standard of level design.

Oh, it didn't need to feel so gigantic, it WAS so gigantic. Largest game world ever created. However, I didn't like that feature with random dungeons as much. I mean it was okay, but I wouldn't want it in. Random dungeons still works for Diablo because they are big but not too big plus it's just a dungeon diver, a fun dungeon diver nonetheless. I just don't think random dungeons work in TES anymore, hand crafted works of art however do.

Apart from making no sense in game, this wouldn't be feasible. Since no other dungeons in the game use this method, and they will all be intricately handcrafted, it would require a hell of a lot of extra work just to create this one, bizzare easter egg dungeon and get it to actually work.

Bethesda probably removed randomized dungeons because they realized that it was a terrible idea. Daggerfall's dungeons were huge, yes, but I also recall that non-quest dungeons were horribly bland and generic, and didn't make any sense in their layout, now, part of the genericness might be due to there not being enough dungeon tile-sets available, and the lack of detail of the game's dungeons that results from the technical limitations of the time, but that you can't blame it all on that, even using a reletively small amount of different models and textures, one can create quite varied environments through creative use of the available assets, and the key is on creative, having the computer randomly generate environments just doesn't do it because there isn't any creativity involved, it's just the computer placing things at random based on certain defined factors, and there's simply no way that can be as interesting as what talented, hard-working level designers can create given enough time and the proper tools. In the end, Bethesa decided that hand crafted environments are the way to go, and I completely, fully agree with this choice 100%. If it came down to it, I don't care if we can have dungeons that we can spend days in if these dungeons are all boring, because I won't want to explore them anyway, I'd much rather have all dungeons be the same size as the average ancestral tomb in Morrowind if it means they can be varied, at least then, I have a reason to want to explore them. Just give me hand-crafted, interesting dungeons that make some degree of sense in their layout, they don't all need to be huge, though I don't mind some dungeons being exceptionally large, in-fact, I wouldn't want to spend days in a dungeon, while it can be dissappointing when I finish exploring a dungeon too quickly, the inverse is not good, because if a dungeon starts to take too long, it just becomes a chore and I want to finish it as quickly as possible, rather than taking any pleasure in it, and when that happens in a game, it means the developers did something wrong, I'm content to keep the dungeons of a reasonable size, though with some of course larger than others.



I agree with what Dragonbone said earlier, how would such a thing make any sense in-game? And it seems to me that programming a random dungeon generator for JUST ONE individual dungeon is a lot more trouble than it's worth.



Being afraid in a game can be a good thing, but when fear turns to boredom and annoyance, then it's not good anymore. And having dungeons that are absurdly huge and extremely bland is the perfect combination to cause such a situation.

The tunnels in the Oblivion worlds was made this way. two-three random cells after each other. Probably the only realistic way to do this without a lot of work, yes you could have elements say 12 places and perhaps 24 pieces to place with some rules, more like in Daggerfall but it would require far more work.

No. That kind of stuff might fly back in the day but it would not be effective now

Intricately hand crafted. Some kind of catch phrase going on here or something? I hear it over and over and it sounds like a bunch of people on a 3 AM infomercial waving dollar bills at some snake oil shyster. Haha. Did you guys even play OB and MW? The majority were incredibly vanilla and many didn't make any "sense". And why was it that every freaking ruin or fort in the countryside had been overruns by something or other anyway? Where is the lore for that? How would anyone in the country survive when everything is overrun with this that and the other thing. How would the people in the city survive without farmers? The countryside is apparently a tolkein style jurassic park, can't farm there.

Oblivion had one dungeon designer. Skyrim has 8. Oblivion had about 250 dungeons. Skyrim has currently about 130, meaning much more effort can be put into each one. The devs have explained that this time a lot more conscious thought was put into crafting the word dynamically and uniquely, including dungeons. You only have to read some of the articles on the preview to get glimpses of this in action. And regardless of whether you expect them to be good, adding one random dungeon would still be a huge waste of additional time and effort since it's clear they're not going for that and haven't designed it to work that way. As odd is it may seem, Skyrim is not the same game as Oblivion or Morrowind.

I agree that the OB and MW dungeons were basically just renditions of the same things, not exactly the same but felt the same (though I liked the Ayleid ruin feel) However, I'm not sure what you mean the countryside was overrun by something. Oblivion didn't have really any countryside overrun quests except for the goblin war quest where the town was in the middle of two warring goblin tribes though I guess you could count the Fighter's guild quest where the town was "overrun" with goblins *cough*

I didn't say Morrowind and Oblivion had great dungeons either, I recognize that they had some problems, but having randomly generated dungeons wouldn't fix that, it would serve only to make the problems worse. Now on the other hand, having eight people designing dungeons and having fewer dungeons to begin with should help to make dungeons a lot more interesting. We're not talking about Morrowind or Oblivion here, sure, those games may not have had the best dungeons ever, but I've also seen some pretty well designed hand-crafted dungeons, on the other hand, I can't name any RPG I've played that had randomly generated dungeons I'd actually say were good.

And while every dungeon being filled with enemies isn't entirely realistic, it's the kind of unrealism I'm willing to accept for the sake of making an entertaining game, because an entirely empty ruin would be pretty boring to explore, and it would be rather unbalancing if dungeons with high quality loot in were left unguarded, so I can buy enemies in every ruin for the sake of enjoying the game, much more easily than a structure supposedly made for a specific purpose being a random network of tunnels that does not appear to actually be able to fulfill the purpose it was made for, and when your dungeons actually ARE random, that sort of thing is likely to happen. And it's certainly more plausible then one single dungeon being able to somehow randomly rearrange itself in not just size and shape, but what kind of loot and enemies it contains, with players being able to control it, how does such a thing even work? Who built it? Why was it built? Why is there only one in Skyrim? If you don't explain those things, it wouldn't make sense.